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What it means to forgive…

The following is a quote I shared in my message last night that didn’t make it onto the sermon notes that we hand out each week so I thought I’d share it here. 

Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind. It hooks you into its instant replays. And each time it replays, you feel the clap of pain again. To forgive is to put down your 50-pound pack after a 10-mile climb up a mountain. To forgive is to fall into a chair after a 15-mile marathon. To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. To forgive is to reach back into your hurting past and recreate it in your memory so that you can begin again. To forgive is to dance to the beat of God’s forgiving heart. It is to ride the crest of love’s strongest wave. Our only escape from history’s cruel unfairness, our only passage to the future’s creative possibilities, is the miracle of forgiving. 

Dr. Lewis Smedes, Fuller Seminary : “The Power of Forgivness”